Video Freezing While Audio Keeps Playing

[TechOwl]

Hey Everyone,

I recently updated my Dune HD Homatics box to Android 12 due to some stuttering issues in Android 11 that it had. Now, what happens when I go to watch an episode of a show, it will play normally for about 20-30 seconds before the video will freeze. The app is fine and the audio continues to play but the video will freeze. The only way to get it start playing the video again is to seek to a different time or have it reload the stream by, for instance, selecting a different audio/subtitle. This issue didn't occur at all back on Android 11 but for some reason the official Jellyfin Android TV app is the only app that seems to have this issue for me. If I use an external player like MX Player, everything plays completely fine. I've tried playing around with the resolutions, HDR, AFR, and even connected to my box via ADB to check out the logs. Even that doesn't show anything useful, it seems to act as if there's no issue at all, no error or warning logs, just normal requests to and from my server. Even though it doesn't seem to be the issue, I checked the server side logs as well and didn't see any error or warning messages in the Jellyfin log or in the ffmpeg logs either. I've also tried rolling back to an earlier version (v0.17.4) and setting the WebView version to Beta, Dev, and Canary through ADB, all with the same issue. I'm kinda at a loss here so any thoughts would be appreciated! Let me know if I need to provide any more info.

[TheDreadPirate]

What are your server specs? OS and hardware.

[TechOwl]

Server OS & Hardware
Ryzen 5 5500U (6C/12T)
64G Memory
Radeon Vega 7 iGPU
Proxmox 8.2.7

Jellyfin Container OS & Hardware
Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
Hardware Acceleration Enabled (iGPU is shared to container)
4 Cores
12G Memory

Media info of the file
Video
Title: Japanese [Uncut] - 1080p - H264 - SDR
Codec: H264
AVC: Yes
Profile: High
Level: 40
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Anamorphic: No
Interlaced: No
Framerate: 23.976025
Bitrate: 8244 kbps
Bit depth: 8 bit
Video range: SDR
Video range type: SDR
Color space: bt709
Color transfer: bt709
Color primaries: bt709
Pixel format: yuv420p
Ref frames: 1
NAL: 4

Application version
0.17.8

Device information
Dune HD Homatics R 4K Plus

Android version
Android TV 12

Jellyfin server version
10.9.11

[TheDreadPirate]

And what about the server? What OS and what are the hardware specs? And can you share your server logs via pastebin?

[TechOwl]

Updated my first comment with the hardware specs.

Here's the logs for the days I was seeing the issue:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Tech-O...n/jLog.txt

[TheDreadPirate]

Can you share your ffmpeg log?

[TechOwl]

Sorry for the delay,

I generated an ffmpeg log for the episode. I let it run until it froze and then exited. Seems to happen after ~40 secs.

Also, ignore the "Unknown/unsupported AVCodecID DISABLED". I set the codec-id of the subtitles on my MKV files to "DISABLED" when I don't want them to show up in Jellyfin and don't want to remux a file. Hasn't caused any issues in the past.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Tech-O...eg-Log.txt

[TechOwl]

To add on to everything we've collected so far, I collected the output of running logcat while watching the episode on the Jellyfin Android TV Debug app. I collected from before I started the episode up until a few seconds after it froze.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Tech-O...output.txt

Furthermore, just randomly I tried playing an episode of one of my different shows, and it played absolutely fine with no issues. So what I'm thinking here is that the issue is client-side with a compatibility issue with the file? This video-only freezing issue is specific to this device and this player. If I play the same episode using Kodi instead of the Jellyfin Android TV app, it runs perfectly fine (that's the workaround I've been using for the time being). It also plays fine on my phone and laptop so it has to be something with this device, video, and the Jellyfin Android TV app specifically.

Here's the media info of the file that works:

Video
Title: 1080p HEVC SDR
Codec: HEVC
AVC: No
Profile: Main 10
Level: 120
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Anamorphic: No
Interlaced: No
Framerate: 23.976025
Bitrate: 1296 kbps
Bit depth: 10 bit
Video range: SDR
Video range type: SDR
Color space: bt709
Color transfer: bt709
Color primaries: bt709
Pixel format: yuv420p10le
Ref frames: 1

The only difference here that I feel like could affect the playback is that this video's codec is HEVC (H.265) while the video having issues is AVC (H.264). But I would assume the H.264 video is being transcoded to H.265 since I have hardware encoding enabled on my server.

[TheDreadPirate]

If the video is corrupt in some way, that could also be a problem. Does this only happen with a particular episode? Or particular series? All from the same source?

[TechOwl]

After doing some messing around, I've narrowed down the problem a little bit. The video freezing only happens when H.264 content is being transcoded to H.265. If I disable H.265 transcoding globally on my Jellyfin server, there are no issues. That's why the second episode that I posted worked fine, because it was already H.265 content which means it didn't need to be transcoded at all. Shout out to the guy who responded to my GitHub issue saying he was having the same issue related to transcoding. Reminder that H.265 transcoding works fine on any other device, its just this particular combination of Amlogic SOC, Jellyfin Android TV App, and transcoding (in this case H.264 -> H.265). Changing devices, apps, and transcoding formats resolves the issue.

The only issue now though is why transcoding causes an issue only on the Jellyfin Android TV app? I see no reason why this issue wouldn't occur when using Kodi and Jellycon. From what I understand, it does the same transcoding, its literally just displaying it in a different app.

---

Also, seems like I'm not the only one having this issue:

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-and...ssues/4159